https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10333663/Family-health-insurance-gets-550-000-bill-offered-46-000-MONTH-year.html

Family with health insurance gets a $550,000 bill - and a
payment plan offer of $46,000 a MONTH for a year - after
premature baby had to spend two months in ICU

.. . .

Apparently Orlando FL ....

Sounds horrible - but intensive care is EXPENSIVE ! It's
the other side of modern medicine, they can do SO much
more than in the old days but the tech is super-pricey.
Ten or twenty years ago, the preemie would have just
died within days whether you were rich poor or otherwise.

The crux of the biscuit here seems to be that the mothers
employer switched insurance carriers in mid-stream. Neither
would pick up the giant bill. It was nothing classist or
racist or anything else - just "technical".

However someone finally WAS clever enough to figure
it out ...

"The bill was eventually cleared up in September after
the hospital finally sent United Healthcare the bill
for 2020 and UMR for 2021's coverage"

And now for the Covid moment - some HAVE proposed to
exempt insurers from paying the hospital bills of
anti-vax victims ..... Joe could probably do it with
an XO. Covid intensive care is as expensive as the
care for that preemie. Insurers - like after huge
natural disasters - must either fail and leave
everybody out in the cold OR have their expenses
picked up by the govt. Doesn't work any other way
(other than insurance being ten times as expensive
as it is now).

Alas, hospitals, due to ethics/vows/image/etc,
can't just let people die in droves outside the
front door. Ergo THEY would have to eat the bills
and either hyper-escalate their prices or go out
of biz - which would be a real disaster.

This cost/insurance/service equation is all
interlinked. Each is linked to the other. There
is no real "fix" - just kludges. Even "socialized"
medicine ... read up on the hospital equation
in the UK and EU ... chaos and implosion .....

In the 1930s, bank failures were everyone's big
dread - and we got FDIC and related federal
insurance programs as a result. TODAY we don't
worry so much about the banks (though maybe we
should) it's health/property insurance instead.
Hurricanes, tornadoes, drought and flood have
put many smaller insurers out of business and
left mass quantities of people just swinging
in the breeze with impossible bills. Medical,
well, see the above.

The health industry - and I mean "industry" - also
generates massive bills and natural disasters like
Covid can also put insurers out of biz. That's the
math, that's how it works, no something for nothing
(despite Marxist pipe-dreams). To cover losses,
hospitals always try to max-out insurance - which
means you NEVER have quite enough AND the bills
to insurers keep escalating.

What a mess !

But then some things invented by humans are just
like that ... what we want/expect and what reality
can actually deliver are often quite different
things. Old days, you get sick and the tigers eat
yer ass - problem solved. Now ....